Geo’s Tech Blog
Mindful Tech Transitions, UCLA Professor Gmail Lockouts
By Geo B.
June 2024, Los Angeles -This week I went to a doctors officle in DTLA to continue upgrading their windows 7 boxes to 11. The receptionists were happy with the last round of upgrades. A month ago I started by hooking up the new windows 11 tiny little dell optiplexes next to their existing machines. My idea was to introduce a smooth transition. When it comes to technology the best approach is always mindful transitioning whether administering an upgrade to others or to yourself. Case in point, my partner who teaches at UCLA, having her Google Workspace suddenly taken off her schools email address. Yes, they had sent a mention this would happen to due budget cuts a months ago in an alumni email but there was no mindfulness involved. No followup or confirmation request or anything. A brutal transition that has left many professors to lose enormous historical work related and personal photos.
That’s why I learned to appraach my clients with mindfulness of technological transitions. I’m convinced there is trauma in technology, trauma on the internet and in how devices so heavily relied on can disrupt a persons sense of safety. The rest of the world has not caught up with my approach yet and I don’t know if they can. The impulsiveness of pulling professors, many of whom are Phd level scatterbrained genius’ (a trait Einstein was renound for having), body of works without at least 3 reminders and possibly a phone call is barbaric. If the professor got used to the workspace and planned on migrating data at least have a tech support rep call them to do it. The disregard here for human beings is tantamount to being a crime against humanity.
A few years ago in the local LA tech support struggle scene I was working for another tech supoort outfit in Venice. They would send me on local runs to fix peoples printers or software issues and every morning I would wake up with a list of random tasks around the west side. Without a car I would hop on my fixed gear bike and get the most amount of exercise mixed with brain power related jobs possibly in my life. If I showed you a chart of my brain power metrics at 25, working in the NY post-production web1.0 world teaching at a small private film school and running my dvd authoring business, I’m not sure those days would hold a candle to biking in 100 degree heat through LA to upgrade a massage schools Win 8 server. It was around this point in my life journey with tech where I begin toying with the idea of mindful transitions in tech as an actual thing. Like a massage – but for how we are all either enhanced by, or drained by our tools. Now this can lead into my book’s work on impulse control and attention crafting, which is what that seed has become. And I really want to stay on track with the blog to just transmit what I’m seeing around me in the foxhole right now.
The view from down here is people are in being put in negative vibes by their tech without knowing it. Personally, I has denied for years that my iPad 2 was obsolete and lived with slow performance trying to squeeze every last bit of usability out of it before one day it just stopped working. In the process I lost all this hobby work and interesting writing that device would afford me to write. You see, because different types of devices offer us new ways of doing things that when we get fixated on the device itself -what I call the object-attachment -our perception of the tasks we do on it becomes static. We just associate it as our everything box that will be there forever. Until it isn’t because its silicon, sand and plastic wrapped in a machine smooth package.
The same applies to enterprise level affordances, like a gmail account you get from a school. In the case of UCLA rescinding, or rather straight up deleting every professors workspace (if that is true they cannot restore it temporarily for the professors to get back their work or photos) a negative vibe was induced throughout the alumni community. I know this sounds innocous and tangential to my main job upgrading a doctors office but hear me out. I’m brought in for transitions, for fixes, for my method and approach to dealing with people around technology. Whether thats a single individual with a printer issue or an office of people I work out detailed mindful transition plans based on talking with everyone. And that did not happen at UCLA, and it might not happen with your next big tech transition either.